Dear families and teachers,
Story Lab has had a month filled with imaginative play and book-writing! From diving into writing a children’s book with SEER school to searching for clues on a scavenger hunt with our high school session, we’ve had a wonderful time this early spring!
Students continue to be as inventive as ever. The elementary school session wrote stories and acted them out for each other (without using words) to have us guess their plots. Tyler mimed a story football player who kept breaking his bones and eventually turned into a piece of paper and floated around.
High school students did a “scavenger hunt” in our classroom space, where they were prompted to search for song lyrics, hidden prompts behind the whiteboard, and random lines in books for creative inspiration. They wrote poems and stories based on random words, phrases, music, and images they found around the classroom. Finally, Story Lab had a BLAST visiting BLAST (Blatchley’s after school program) to invent words and come up with origin stories for them.
Story Lab students have also been writing books. This week, our middle school students wrote parts of their novels and workshopped them with each other. We will be working for the next few weeks on our long-term stories, for possible inclusion in Story Lab’s first student anthology this spring.
In school, Story Lab has been writing a children’s book with SEER School students! Based on West African stories about a trickster spider named Anansi, we are coming up with our own “Anansi story” based on Sitka animals and landscapes. We read Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock as a model and decided on Sitka’s very own trickster animal. I’ll keep it a surprise – we’ll perform the story eventually at a Readers’ Theater. Keep your eyes peeled for the announcement for that!
Story Lab hosts free, after-school creative writing and storytelling classes to students ages 7-19. Registration is rolling, and all students are welcome! Elementary school sessions meet every other Tuesday 3:00-4:30, middle school every Wednesday 3:30-5:00, and high school every Friday 4:40-6:00. For questions, contact the number above or sarah@iialaska.org.